Cinema
Cinema Manovich discusses cinema as a part of his cultural interface theory. He describes how the Printed word tradtion, which used to dominate the langauge of cultural interfaces, is becoming less important while the part played by cinema is getting progressively stronger. He talks about how the proggression of cinema links with the trend of modern society towards audio-visual moving image sequences rather than text and how new generations are growing up in a media rich environment that is highly dominated by television rather than by printed texts. Manovich explains how we are able to understand cinema and moving images easily, without them being confusing allowing us to understand that theres a frame around the image, cutting the full image that the eye can see. With knowing this, we dont assume when watching cinematic films that although there is a screen around the image, we know there is more to the surroundings and use our imaginations to think about what could be there. When talking about this he says 'The onscreen space is habitually perceived as included within a more vast scenographic space, even though the onscreen space is the only visible part, the longer scenographic part is nonetheless considered to exist around it' When talking about cinema, Lev considers that most of the cinematic viewers are also computer users, stating that in contrast to cinema where most of its 'users' were able to 'understand' cinematic language but not 'speak' it (for example make films). all computer users cam 'speak' the language of the interface. What he means by saying this is that computer users are able to send emails, organise their files as well as run various applications whilst using their computers whereas a high number of cinematic viewers are unable to make professional films yet they are able to understand them whilst viewing them. Throughout his book, he discusses the important aspects of cinema and the influence they have on cultural interfaces. Beginning with the mobile camera, he tells us how this was originally developed as a part of 3D computer graphics technology for such applications as computer aided design. flight simulators and computer movie making. Discussing further how we became to use these to make our videos and films he continues to state how computer culture is gradually spatializing all representations and experiences and how they become subjected to the camera's particular grammar including zooms, tilts, pans and tracks of movement; we now use these operations to interact with data spaces, models, objects and bodies. With the use of the 3D camera and the tricks that are used whilst filming, lev tells how thanks to this, cinematic vision triumphed over the print tradition, with the camera subsuming the page. Manovich talks of aspects of cinema that also exist in cultural interfaces, one of these being the retangular framing of represented reality. The frame acts as a window onto a larger space which assumed to extend beyond the frame. Just as a rectangular frame of painting and photography presents a part of a larger space outside it, a window in HCI presents a partial view of a larger document. Continuing. the camera is now controlled by the user in cinema and in fact is identified with his or her own sight yet it is crucial that one is seeing the virtual world through a rectangular frame and that this frame is always presents only a part of a larger whole. This frame creates a distinct subjective experience which is more close to cinematic perception than to unmediated sight. One thing he considers when continuing through his research into cinema is that the 21st Century cinema involves a user represented as an avatar existing literally 'inside' the narrative space, rendered with photorealistic 3D computer graphics, interacting with virtual characters and perhaps other users, and affecting the course of narrative of events. Concluding, cinema, the major cultural form of the 20th century has found a new life as the toolbox of a computer user. Cinematic means of perception, of connecting space and time, of representing human memory, thinking and emotions become a way of work and a way of life for millions in the computer age. Cinema's aesthetic strategies has become basical organizational principles of computer software. The window in a fictional world of cinematic narrative has become a window in a datascape. In short, what was cinema has become human computer interface (HCI)